Featured image: (Pacer Graphic / Dylan Sulcer)

(Warning: Spoilers for major plot points of The Boys and mentions of sexual assault)

We treat celebrities like heroes. We build them up, defend them online and excuse them until protecting the image feels easier than confronting the horrifying truth but the truth is simple: they are just human beings with enough money, enough influence and power to avoid jail time and court dates.

The Boys, the hit Prime video series, exposes that dynamic by turning superhero culture into a mirror for celebrity worship; it shows how easily Society accepts power when it is packaged correctly and wrapped up with a beautiful bow. It properly demonstrates how accountability quickly disappears when the image is valuable enough. In this world superheroes are not protectors, they are corporate products owned by Vought International carefully manufactured for public enjoyment and treated more like celebrities and public figures than accountable individuals. They save people on camera when it benefits the brand and they apologize when it benefits their image and they remain protected even when their actions suggest that they should not be.

That illusion is clearest in Soldier Boy and Homelander.

Soldier Boy represents nostalgia; he represents how he would say a “better” era of heroism claiming he comes from a time where heroes were real before branding, social media and celebrity culture took over. But the show dismantles that myth through flashbacks and testimony from Payback members like Crimson Countess and Black Noir. It is revealed that his legacy was controlled and curated violence was hidden stories were covered up and his image was engineered for public consumption. It was never real, but a good disguise.

That illusion evolves into Homelander.

Soldier Boy is not separate from him, he is a part of the same system that produced him and made him what he is today. Where Soldier Boy represents controlled myths, Homelander represents full visibility heroism turned into constant branded performance and entertainment. His identity is not just constructed, it’s sold for public consumption and people worship him for it.

But under this facade, Homelander is unstable, insecure and violent. Even when he publicly unravels, the system does not reject him at all; it protects him much like when the video of the Transoceanic Flight 37 video came out. On Firecracker’s show in Season 5, she reports that the video is AI and that Homelander has seven fingers, but it was manufactured to look that way to protect his image.

That is where “The Boys” stops being fiction and starts reflecting the reality of our celebrity culture, warning us about how celebrities get away with heinous crimes because of their wealth and their fame.

For example, let’s go back all the way to 2000 when Jack Nicholson, a very renowned actor, was sued by a woman who said that he had sexually assaulted her after he refused to pay her for her services. Then let’s go to a more recent one in 2011 when Katy Perry was accused of sexually assaulting Ruby Rose in a night out in Melbourne, according to The Rolling Stone Magazine. The most famous example today is clearly Sean Diddy Combs, who faces severe criminal charges and multiple lawsuits over the years alleging sexual trafficking, sexual assault, drugging and physical abuse. For decades, it took over a hundred individuals just to bring him down after he fell off the fame map that could no longer protect him.

These responses fracture into denial selective memory, or, separating the persona from the person, which is the incorrect thing to do. The image survives even when the reality does not.

Now we meet our “hero” Billy Butcher, who begins a resistance. He leads The Boys, a group formed to take down corrupt superheroes, because he has personal beef with Homelander. At first he appears to reject the illusion that the fame that superheroes have is nothing but an inauthentic show that they put on for the camera. His leadership becomes increasingly controlling and violent as the show goes on. Trust is replaced with manipulation, collaboration with coercion and the justification is because his default logic. Every decision he made up until season 5 is framed as necessary and every boundary is crossed until the line is blurred. He becomes nearly unrecognizable from Homelander at this point in the show, becoming the very thing he hates.

He doesn’t have his fall from grace within one dramatic gory action, he grows desensitized through repetition of violent acts. That is the point of this show, no one will ever stay clean in a system where image, corrupt deals and good television matter more than the people watching.

That is what makes “The Boys” so effective as a show; it’s not the shock value, the complex characters or the plot. It’s the collapse of these almost god-like figures. Homelander has constant public breaks while he tries to ascend into godhood and be worshipped more than he already is. Soldier Boy’s myth explores a manufactured history of how a golden legend isn’t so shiny and golden anymore. Butcher’s a man who claimed to stand for common good who starts to mirror the very thing he hates.

We are compelled to keep watching for that reason.

Because watching ‘heroes’ fall apart feels like a tragic truth exposing it’s ugly head, it shows the real huge cost of idolizing power. Make no mistake, heroes aren’t born, they are made, built, sold like merchandise and excused for heinous crimes until the new news cycle forgets all about what they did.

Homelander did not break the system with his rising to power, he was originally a good person was unfortunately given some really bad advice from someone who wanted to use him. The system keeps him standing on 2 feet.

The only thing more dangerous than a man like him is a world that decides he’s worth keeping.